Logo of the movie, 1966. Wikicommons/MGM.Some rights reserved.Symbolism is an essential part of politics and it often matters more than reality. The key for political elites is to send the right message at the right time and that gains them support and popularity.
In Greece, SYRIZA took the first position in the January 2014 elections on the promise of “dignity and hope”, irrespective of whether the government had a realistic plan to handle one of the most difficult crises of modern Greece. As such, one of the pre-electoral promises of SYRIZA was to end the Troika in Greece.
Once in power, one of the first actions of the new government was renaming the “Troika” as “institutions”, a rather sensationalist way of removing a charged term from the Greek crisis vocabulary; this was indeed hugely symbolic for the majority of Greeks because the Troika has been associated with a perceived “colonial” presence of creditors’ techno(auto)crats, regularly monitoring and subsequently demanding more austerity measures and sacrifices by the Greek people.
